Scream 6

Review

Just like the last movie Scream 6 ended up predicting it’s own score but this time it wasn’t that bad because I as I left the theater I was stuck between giving it a 6 or a 7. Before going into the theater I had heard some good things and honestly I do think that this movie was good. For Scream 5 I said something along the lines of ‘this movie didn’t work for me but there were some cool parts’ and I feel like the reverse is true for this film, overall the movie worked as a whole really well for me but there were some parts of it that just really don’t work for me, so now onto my thoughts!

This movie shakes up the typical formula by having Ghostface show up to kill people in NEW YORK CITY BABY!!!! Other than that it’s basically Scream 2: Electric Boogaloo, Tara and her friends are at college now with bigger set pieces, more scares, more gore, and a slightly more serious tone than the original.

As I mentioned earlier a lot of the things I like were more reflective of the whole movie and a lot of the things I didn’t like were generally more nitpicky so I guess I’ll start with the positives first.

First off, in this movie Ghostface was probably the highlight of the movie. This is probably the scariest Ghostface we’ve gotten since the original and it’s definitely the most aggressive Ghostface we’ve ever gotten. This movie as a whole almost reminded me of like Halloween, where Micheal Myers is the highlight and even though you care about the characters whenever he appears it’s all about him and in this movie’s Ghostface definitely had that feeling. I loved how fucking relentless he is and since he’s human and he struggles to do things like slam open doors with his body you get a first hand look at how fucking aggressive he is as he continually slams his body into doors over and over for full minutes just to attack someone. He’s super aggressive and I absolutely loved it.

However, I will say that for as aggressive as Ghostface was in this movie he was just as ineffective at actually killing people. All in all, he ended up killing the two guys at the beginning, Mindy’s girlfriend, Gale’s partner and I think that’s it. The film professor dies in the beginning but she doesn’t count because it wasn’t the main Ghostface who did the kill. Considering Mindy, Gale, Chad, Tara, Sam, and Kirby all made it out and that’s almost the entirety of the main cast minus the killers which is a little absurd for a big slasher to kill basically no one.

Anyways, back to the positives, this movie came off to me as being a little silly. Moments like when the two Ghostfaces wipe their blades at the same time just made me laugh because it was just a little silly. Idk if the silliness is intentional but either way it made me enjoy the movie exponentially more. On top of silly visuals and stuff, the noises that Ghostface makes are so fucking dumb and they made me laugh every fucking time.

I thought that the dialogue was a lot more successful in this movie when compared to Scream 5. I definitely cringed a lot less from the lines and the delivery, there were still some moments that I didn’t like but it was a marked improvements overall. As for the issues I had, I felt like there was a few moments where the dialogue felt super ‘sit down and listen to this exposition’ and I feel like the horror landscape hasn’t changed enough for the rules to feel fresh and not like a repetition of rules from previous movies.

I kind of touched on this earlier when I was talking about Ghostface but I thought this movie was pretty scary. Moments like the convenience store scene were super scary and I think this movie went a lot farther with it’s scare factor than the fifth movie did and I really appreciated it.

Finally, I thought the movie theater murder den was so fucking cool. I think that it was a really cool set-piece and all of the chase scenes within the movie theater were really cool and effective.

Now for the things I found less than stellar, first off, I hated what they did to Gale’s character. She spent 4 movies becoming a better person and removing herself from the horrific cycle of the press taking advantage of victims and sensationalizing horrific tragedies for the movie to put her right back where she was in the first two movies which I just thought was a little insulting considering it was mostly so the main cast could be more isolated and for a boring reference to the original that I thought was better done in the second movie.

Sam was still a drag in this movie. I think the worst part about me not really liking Sam is she’s taking the place of Sidney Prescott who is arguably one of the best final girls in the genre. Sid wasn’t even in this movie and boy did I miss her. Sam didn’t really change much from the last movie and I still didn’t like her but that’s about all I have to say about her. Speaking of Sam I just have personal issues with horror movies naming mental illness within characters, especially big ones because it can have the effect of really demonizing these mental illnesses on such a massive platform and in this case they name her illness as psychopathy and show how killing her boyfriend ‘felt right’ and allude to her feeling the most at ease when she’s killing or taking on the persona of her father, the murderer, and the whole thing just feels very uncomfortable to me. Speaking of Billy though, why was he in this movie, like he was entirely pointless and, worst of all, he looked bad while being pointless.

Oh yea, the main romance of this movie was between Chad and Tara and honestly it did not work for me. For romances that occur over one movie, I’ll sit and suspend my disbelief but considering these characters had a whole other movie to develop any romance or even chemistry and they barely even talked to each other??? Sorry, but it’s a no from me

Probably the biggest issue I had with the film was who the killers are revealed to be. The lead detective was a fine Ghostface, I can accept him and he was unexpected, but not one but TWO nothing characters making up the other two Ghostfaces just felt egregious to me. Also the contrived connection from the killers to our leads was so odd and contrived and it really gave me flashbacks to Roman Bridger who’s Sid’s estranged brother from when Maureen had a two year stint in Hollywood blah, blah, blah. It was bad then and it’s bad now. I think they were sufficiently scary once revealed but omg did I know absolutely nothing about either of their characters for the most part before they were revealed as the killers.

Oh and one final thing that I remembered after the fact, not to be an annoying Stu girly but like it kinda pissed me off how much they minimized Stu’s participation in the original event, like yea sure Billy was the more dominant person in the killings but like he had a partner and if it wasn’t for Stu he probably wouldn’t have pulled it off considering how fucking suspicious he looked from the beginning

Overall, I had a really good time with this movie and I think it’s a much more worthy successor to the original than 5 was. If this is the trajectory that the Scream franchise is on, I can’t wait to see the next movie in theaters on opening weekend as well.